Dreamfever f-4 Read online

  “And only I can find the Book she needs to do it,” I said coolly. “So who’s expendable?”

  His eyes narrowed minutely and he glanced sideways. Pink Mac wouldn’t have even noticed it. I wasn’t her anymore. My spine snapped straight, and I went nose to nose at the ward line with him. If I could have reached through it and grabbed him by the throat, I would have. “Oh, God, you actually thought that through and decided it was me! You knew I was in trouble and didn’t help me!” I snarled. “You believed I would survive it! Or was it that you figured I’d be even easier to use if I was Pri-ya?”

  His iridescent eyes blazed. “I could not be in two places at once! I was forced to choose. The queen would not have survived the night. It was imperative she survive.”

  “You son of a bitch. You knew they were coming for me.”

  “I did not!”

  “Liar!”

  “By the time I learned what they’d planned, it was too late, MacKayla! Despite my powers, I failed to foresee how dangerous Darroc had become. None of us foresaw it. We believed the walls would weaken further on Samhain, we even believed more of the Unseelie would escape, but we did not believe Darroc could succeed in bringing the walls down completely. Not only did he accomplish the unthinkable, he managed to block all Fae magic as thoroughly as he demolished your human grids. For a time that night, not one of us could sift. Not one of us could change form. Not one of us could draw upon the birthright of our magic. I was forced to carry my queen to a new hiding place on human”—he sneered the word—“feet.”

  “While I lay on my human ass and your fairy”—I sneered the word—”brethren fucked my brains out and nearly killed me.”

  “But failed, MacKayla. But failed. Remember that. You are queenly in your own right.”

  “So the end justifies the means? Is that what you think?”

  “Do they not?”

  “I suffered,” I gritted. “Horrible, unspeakable things.”

  “Yet you stand here now. Toe to toe with a Seelie Prince. Impressive for a human. Perhaps you are becoming what you need to be.”

  “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger? That’s what you think I should take away from this?”

  “Yes! And be glad for it.”

  “Let me tell you something.” I fisted my hand in the collar of his shirt. “What I will be glad for is the day the last one of you is dead.”

  He went oddly, completely still.

  I shook him. He didn’t budge.

  I blinked, then got it. He was frozen. I’d Nulled him. Nulling is a rare sidhe-seer talent and, according to Rowena, I’m the last Null alive. I can freeze a Fae with the mere touch of my hands. I can turn it on or off at will, the same way Fae Princes can control their lethal eroticism. I hadn’t even been thinking about Nulling, but apparently my hostility toward his race in general had come across as intent to Null. Since he was already frozen, I punched him a few times, indulging my rage at all things Fae.

  Then I focused on my sidhe-seer center and forced it to relax.

  A muscle worked in his perfect jaw. Oh, yes, he’d been brushing up on his human gestures. “Punching me was not necessary.”

  Oops. I’d forgotten they were only frozen when I Nulled them, not oblivious. Oh, well. “But it sure felt good.”

  “Well done, MacKayla,” he said tightly.

  “For freezing you? I’ve done it before.”

  “Not that.” He looked down at my hand.

  I looked down at it, too. Then past it, to my feet.

  I was over the ward line. I’d stepped right through it without even realizing it. Not only that, I was holding a Seelie Prince by the collar and I wasn’t remotely aroused. No matter the form V’lane had donned in the past, I’d never stood so close to him without having to battle the irresistible impulse to have sex with him, right then and there, even when he’d been toned down as far as—according to him—he could go.

  I leaned into him, pressed myself against his perfect Fae body. He molded to me instantly, slid his arms around me, dropped his face to my hair. He was hard, ready.

  I felt nothing.

  I drew back and looked up. There was that minute contraction and widening of his eyes again. Astonishment. Why? What had astonished him when he’d first seen me? That I had recovered from being Pri-ya? Or something more—a thing virtually inconceivable to him?

  I stretched on my toes, pulled his head down, and kissed him. His response was instant and held every bit of one hundred and forty thousand years of sexual expertise—but not one ounce of that elusive, deadly death-by-sex Fae quality.

  I pushed back and stared at him. I could feel intense sexual arousal rolling off him, but no more so than I would coming off any man. There went that muscle in his jaw again. Was it possible he wasn’t muting himself? I’d heard that if you took certain poisons but didn’t die, you acquired immunity. Had I drunk enough Poison de Fae? “Unmute yourself,” I demanded.

  “I. Am. Not. Muted.”

  Did he ever sound pissed! “You’re lying.” Could it really be true? Had everything I’d gone through made me immune to Fae sexual compulsion?

  “No, MacKayla.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I would not be lulled into stupidity again, into believing something that wasn’t true, so it could be used against me.

  “I would not have believed it, either. No human has ever come back from being made Pri-ya, and, although I am pleased that you have recovered from what was done to you, I am not pleased that I must now compete for you with no glamour, without the glory of my birthright. They were Unseelie, MacKayla, the foulest of the foul, the darkest of my race, the abominations. I am Seelie, and we are vastly different. I had hoped that one day, when you trusted me, you would let me share with you the ecstasy of being with one like me. With no pain, MacKayla, and no price. Now that can never be. You have no idea how exquisite the experience might have been and now never will.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. Games within games. That was all my life was anymore. Was he lying just so he could ambush me when I least expected it?

  “You suffered the full, undampened power of three Unseelie Princes. They were inside you. It is impossible to predict all it might have done to you.”

  “Four,” I snarled. “And don’t remind me where they were. I’m acutely aware of it.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits and sparked with inhuman fire. “Four? There were four? Who was this fourth? Was it Barrons? Tell me!”

  I flinched. The thought had never occurred to me. The fourth one who had kept himself concealed from me had been the fourth Unseelie Prince. Hadn’t he? The fourth was Fae. Wasn’t he? All my sidhe-seer abilities had been completely deadened from eating Unseelie flesh the night before, to gain Fae-heightened strength to escape the riots and make it to safety. In all honesty, I couldn’t swear the fourth was Fae. I could only say he’d been intensely sexual.

  Why had he kept his face hidden? All I’d ever seen of him was a glimpse of skin, muscle, tattoo.

  Tattoo.

  “It couldn’t have been Barrons. He was in Scotland that night.”

  V’lane’s anger iced the air. The temperature dropped so sharply that my next inhalation burned my lungs. “Not the entire night, MacKayla. The Keltar ritual to maintain the walls between realms was sabotaged. The circle of stones in which the sacred rites have been performed since the day the Compact was negotiated between my queen and your human Keltar was destroyed, supplanted by a Fae realm. Barrons was last seen at midnight on Samhain. He could easily have been in Dublin before dawn.”

  Ouch! Then why hadn’t he come for me immediately? Why hadn’t he tracked me by the brand he’d stamped at the base of my skull and saved me? For that matter, how long had it taken for him to rescue me from my hell at the abbey? My memory of those early days was badly blurred. “Barrons doesn’t hang out with the Unseelie or the LM. They don’t like him any more than you do.”

  “Indeed.” V’lane’s iridescent eyes were mocking.


  “Remind me,” I said with acid sweetness, “why is that, again?” He’d never told me, and I didn’t think he would now. But I would find out, one way or another. I was going to find out everything, one way or another.

  I had to consider what V’lane was saying. In my unpredictable, frequently inexplicable world, I had to consider everything. Not only did Barrons have some kind of agreement with the Shades, he knew a tremendous amount about the never-before-seen-by-humans-because-they’d-always-been-incarcerated Unseelie half of the Fae race. He was much older than a human could be, and I’d recently caught him stepping out of the Unseelie Silver he kept in his study at the bookstore, carrying a woman who’d been brutally killed.

  What possible reason might Barrons have to turn me Pri-ya, then bring me back? For the opportunity to play the hero? To storm in and save the day, in hopes of securing my blind faith once and for all? Not only hadn’t it worked, but why wouldn’t he just keep me Pri-ya and use me? He could have stopped in his efforts to restore my mind halfway through, left me hanging in a mentally impaired yet functional Pri-ya state indefinitely, and I’d have done anything he’d asked, to keep getting sex. I’d have traipsed all over the world, hunting the Dark Book, slave to his every command.

  But he hadn’t. He’d brought me all the way back. Freed me.

  “What does Barrons want, MacKayla?” V’lane said softly.

  Same thing as V’lane and everyone else I’d met since I’d arrived in Dublin: the Sinsar Dubh. But neither Barrons nor I could touch it. I could track it, and he believed I had the potential to get my hands on it eventually, with the right training.

  I didn’t believe Barrons had been the fourth. That wasn’t his way. But might it have been his idea of “the right training”? How far would Barrons go to get what he wanted? He was mercenary to the core, constantly pushing me, trying to make me tougher, stronger. Trying to make me what I needed to be in order to do what he wanted me to do.

  I was now immune to death-by-sex Fae. I could walk through wards. I was more powerful in ways that could have been accomplished only by putting me through something that would either kill me or make me stronger. A proving ground: die or evolve.

  It was too awful for me to contemplate. “Maybe the fourth was you, V’lane. How do I know it wasn’t?”

  My skin frosted. When I shivered, crystals of ice fell in a small snowstorm to the sidewalk. “I was with my queen.”

  “So you say.”

  “I would never harm you.”

  “You constantly manipulate me sexually.”

  “Only to a pleasurable limit.”

  “According to who?”

  His face tightened. “You do not understand my race. Seelie and Unseelie do not suffer the other to exist. We do not consort. Even now we battle, as we did before, so long ago.”

  “So you say.”

  “How can I set your mind at ease, MacKayla?”

  “You can’t.” I could trust no one. Rely on nothing but myself. “I don’t know who the fourth was that day, but I will find out. And when I do …” I reached for the comfort of my gun and smiled coldly. By Fae weapon or human, I would have revenge.

  “Ah, yes, you have changed.” V’lane’s eyes narrowed, and he studied me. “Could it be?” he murmured.

  “What?” I demanded. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. Fascination in a Fae’s eyes is never a good thing.

  “Behold me. I believe you can.” Was that grudging respect in his voice? He shimmered and was suddenly something else.

  I’d seen a vision similar to the one he showed me now that morning at the church, when the three Unseelie Princes had circled around me, morphing from shape to shape. My brain hadn’t been able to process what I’d been seeing, and I’d guessed it was a complex state of being that had more dimensions than humans could comprehend.

  Unlike the Unseelie Princes, however, V’lane didn’t continue moving from form to form. He adopted a static one. At least, I think it was static. It wasn’t change. Stasis and change are how the Fae define everything. For example, if a human dies—or, as they say, “ceases to exist”—they don’t perceive the loss of life at all, they merely perceive “change.” They’re cold bastards.

  My eyes could see V’lane, but my brain couldn’t define him. We’ve invented only words we’ve had need of, and we’ve never seen anything like this. Energy—but multidimensional? I don’t understand the first thing about dimensions, just the little I learned in school about space, time, and matter. My mind strained to grasp what was before my eyes … expanded … nearly tore itself in two trying to reconcile the image with some frame of reference I understood. I couldn’t find one, and the more I searched and failed, the more frantic I felt, which in turn made me keep trying to find one, which in turn made me more frantic. It was a backfeed loop, escalating quickly. Stop fighting it, I told myself, stop trying to define and simply see.

  The strain eased. I stared.

  “You apprehend me in my true form. Mortals cannot do so and retain a unified mind. It fractures. Well done, MacKayla. Was it not worth it? Would you not do it all over again?”

  Bile rose in my throat. At the cost of a piece of my soul? That’s what he thought? That if I’d been given the choice, I would have chosen to go through what had happened on Samhain? That I would have chosen Dublin falling, the walls coming down, the Unseelie getting freed, being raped and turned into an animal that’d had to be rescued first by Dani, then by Barrons? “I would never have chosen it!” It wasn’t just me who had suffered. How many humans had been slaughtered that night and since?

  He was back in his human form. “Really? For such power? You are immune to me—a Fae Prince. Impervious to sexual glamour. You can gaze upon my true form without your mind fracturing. You can walk through wards. I wonder what else you can do now. What a creature you are becoming.”

  “I’m not a creature. I’m a human and proud of it.”

  “Ah, MacKayla, only a fool would still call you human now.” He vanished, but his voice lingered. “Your spear is at the abbey … Princess.” Laughter danced on the air.

  “I’m not a princess, either,” I snapped, then frowned. “And how do you know where my spear is?”

  “Barrons approaches.” The words were nearly indistinguishable from the chilly morning breeze. A breath of sultry warm air, in sharp contrast to the frigid wintry day, gusted down my shirt and caressed the tops of my breasts.

  I yanked my coat shut and buttoned it. “Stay out of my clothes, even as the hot air you are, V’lane.”

  More laughter. “Unless you wish to see the one that exploited you at your weakest, perhaps even made you so, go southeast, MacKayla, and quickly.”

  A snapshot from late last night flashed behind my eyes: me, nude, straddling Barrons’ face.

  I went.

  Certain dates are stuck in my head, permanently scarred there.

  July 5: the day Alina called my cell phone and left a frantic message that I ended up not hearing until weeks later. She was murdered mere hours after she placed that call.

  August 4: the afternoon I stumbled into a Dark Zone for the first time and ended up on the front steps of Barrons Books and Baubles.

  August 22: the night I had my first skull-splitting encounter with the Sinsar Dubh.

  October 3: the day Barrons fed me Unseelie to bring me back to life and I experienced the intoxicating effects of dark Fae power.

  October 31: yeah, well, enough said. It had been an insane few months.

  Today I had no idea what the date was, so I couldn’t etch it into my memory just yet, but I knew I would never forget a single detail of it.

  The entirety of Dublin had been devoured by Shades, turned into a wasteland. If there was another person alive in the city besides myself, they were in deep hiding.

  I walked for hours through eerily silent districts. Not one blade of grass remained, not a shrub, bush, or tree. I knew I shouldn’t waste time, especially if Barrons was nea
rby, but I needed to see this.

  I collected snapshots of the city like bricks, and I stacked and mortared them into a wall of determination: I would live to see this affront to humanity undone.

  What few newspapers were left on the stands were dated October 31, the last day Dublin had functioned. The city had fallen that night and never gotten back up.

  Storefronts were bashed in, windows broken out. There was glass everywhere, cars abandoned, some on their sides, others burned.

  The worst part of it was the dried husks—I quit counting after a while—blowing down the streets, tumbleweeds of human remains, that part of us that Shades find indigestible.

  I would have wept, but I didn’t seem to have tears left in my body. I gave the bookstore wide berth. I couldn’t bear to see if it had been destroyed. I preferred to keep my second-to-last image of it in mind, the way it had looked the afternoon of Halloween: Everything in its place, waiting for me to return, push open the door, pick up the mail, straighten the magazines people were always riffling through, start a fire, curl up on the chesterfield with a good book, and wait for that first customer of the day.

  Every streetlamp I passed had been smashed, many ripped right out of their concrete bases, twisted and flung, as if by raging giants. Shades have no physical form, so I assumed some other caste of Unseelie must have done this to ensure that, if we somehow managed to get our grids back up and running, there’d be no lamps to route the power to.

  Almost as bad as the husks—I cringed every time I stepped on one and it crunched beneath my feet—were the piles of clothing, cell phones, jewelry, dental devices, implants, and wallets. Each was a sacred burial mound in my mind.

  Still, it didn’t keep me from picking up a few things.

  An open switchblade caught the cold morning light, and my attention. I suspected its owner had been trying to stab the unstabbable when the Shade devoured him. “I’ll put it to good use,” I told the pile of black leather topped by a necklace of metal skulls. “I promise.” I retracted the blade and slid it into my boot.